Water on Fire

Description

In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire.

Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.

Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.“How do we live with war or recover from war? And what if there is more than one war, or even a lifetime of war? There’s an erudition that almost hides itself in this dazzling memoir as El-Ariss takes on these questions, and the result is an adventure among the myths that rule us, an education in Freud, and a dive into the idea of what it could mean to be traumatized and to heal. Deeply moving, funny, erudite, each page is honed to a careful edge—not an extra word. I was dazzled.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“In this beautifully written book, Tarek El-Ariss takes his readers on a journey of discovery of one’s identity, commitment to humanity, and sorrows and ambitions, drawing a vivid picture of life at war from Beirut to New York. A must-read book!” —Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building

“Water on Fire is not a common story of war, loss, displacement, and identity crises, as much as it is a way to trace their inheritance. Tarek El-Ariss tells us that ‘cutting’ and ‘storytelling’ are the same word in Arabic (qass), and discovers that the impossibility of mourning cannot be reconciled through mere descriptive remembering of events. Rather, this reconciliation demands recalling images and fictional characters from scattered books, where literature can make reality of geography, disorder, and vulnerability.” —Iman Mersal, author of The Threshold: Poems

“I can see this little boy carrying water containers home, or swimming at the beautiful beach in Beirut. Playing in shorts or carrying his bag on the way to school. As I read his story, I can’t help but wish for him to escape the bombs. Not only because I know this war, and this city, but also because I deeply understand how alone he feels under an abandoned sky. As an adult, Tarek El-Ariss will weave from his trauma, from this water and this fire, the words that tie in the solitude of a stranger in awe of reason with the joy of knowledge and discovery.” —Hoda Barakat, author of Voices of the LostTarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021–22). Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University, he is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.1
 
WEST END BOY
 
It was the afternoon of a cold spring day. I entered a building lobby on the Upper West Side and headed straight to the left, just as I was instructed. I looked for the name on an intercom by a large brass door. It was the second one from the top. I pressed the button and was immediately buzzed in.
The door led to a windowless room with a couple of couches and chairs, and a stack of magazines on a coffee table, including New York and The New Yorker. The room had old brown carpeting, thinned out by all the wet boots that had rubbed against it over the years. The occasional steaming to remove salt and stain had further shaved off layers of the carpet. There was also a closet with a few coats on the rack and some school bags on the floor. On the wall hung framed posters of classical music concerts and art exhibits. I want to say that Matisse’s painting Dance (I)—the one at MoMA—was among them, but I don’t think it was.
Waiting in the room that day was a woman with graying hair and round glasses whom I would see at the same spot and at the same time for years to come. This new companion and I never uttered a word. Furtive smiles timidly exchanged in a dark waiting room expressed solidarity on our respective journeys into the origin of the self.
After I waited a few minutes, a door opened and another woman appeared. She was in her midfifties and had curly brown hair and hazel eyes that said it all. She was my therapist. She looked me in the eyes as she called my name, inviting me to come into her office.
Between the waiting room and the therapists’ offices there was a narrow hallway that led to an exit door. The patients entered and exited from two different doors, minimizing the chances of running into people they knew.
A conspicuous object on the floor was an old white-noise machine, right outside my therapist’s door. The machine was humming like an open faucet with no water, ensuring that whoever went by that door was not likely to hear what was being revealed inside.
My therapist’s office was small but bright, with a big window overlooking West End Avenue. The furniture dated back to the eighties. There was a bookshelf on the left, a blue corduroy couch or chaise longue on the right, and a large Caucasian rug adorning the floor. The therapist sat on an old Eames chair with a stool in front of her and a framed certificate from the New York Freudian Society above her head. A couple of paintings were hung on the walls, one of them depicting an open door that leads to a dark room at the end of a long, narrow hallway.
 
The therapist I went to see that day was no ordinary one. She was a psychoanalyst in the great tradition of Sigmund Freud, who identified the unconscious and the portals we enter to revisit the past and heal the present. His discoveries include repression, displacement, and projection—concepts and words that entered everyday language and popularized talk therapy as we know it.
But few are the therapists today who adhere to the healing model that Freud put in place. Those who do, meet with their patients four times a week for the duration of the analysis, which could take years. Mine lasted eight. Eight long years of riding subways and ringing bells and talking—and talking and talking—and journeying into the past to recover a feeling, an impression, a whisper. Every session transformed that blue couch in a therapist’s office on the Upper West Side into a launchpad for a monstrous drill that burrowed in my psyche like a Jules Verne machine.
Freud had been in my life from the minute I awakened to this world. I remember when my brother stormed into my dad’s room one day and emphatically declared his opposition to the fact that I was sleeping with my mom in the same bed. Having read something about the Oedipus complex, he explained to my dad—who had read Freud as well—how dangerous intimacies could affect a child’s development.
A blurry scene comes to mind. I’m in that room as well, standing to the side of my dad’s pink couch, where he loved to recline, Roman style. Shadows of my animated brother practicing his dangerous knowledge unravel like screens in my mind. That day, my brother read something that allowed him to see the future. And like Cassandra in Greek mythology, he became consumed by a vision of blood and fire.
 
Oh, misery, misery! Again comes on me
The terrible labor of true prophecy, dizzying prelude.
Do you see these who sit before the house,
Children, like the shapes of dreams?
Children who seem to have been killed by their kinsfolk,
Filling their hands with meat, flesh of themselves,
Guts and entrails, handfuls of lament—
Clear what they hold – the same their father tasted.

As I came of age and started confronting crises of identity and desire, I, too, turned to Freud and his interpretation of Greek myth and literature. Before I even stepped foot in my analyst’s office, I was already practicing Freud’s dicta left and right, applying them to myself, to those around me, and to the novels and films I was reading and watching.
At that time, I considered Freud’s theory to be foolproof, capable of explaining anything and everything under the sun, including individual and collective behaviors. People repressed and acted out, nations fantasized about prehistoric origins and sought to recuperate them through a return to the womb. Projection here and displacement there, Freud was the organizer that gave meaning to the fragmented world that I had come from and that was chasing me wherever I went.
Apply Freud and you will heal!
 
Moving to New York City after several years of living in upstate New York, where I underwent grueling graduate training in the humanities and in Freud’s theories specifically, I was experiencing burn-out. I had no idea what I was going through at first, but I found myself fighting with everyone and suffering from inexplicable rashes and breakdowns. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t diagnose it myself. I needed help, another reader of Freud perhaps, who could immediately recognize my symptoms and show me how to heal them. I was looking for an interlocutor who would give me a few pointers and help me adjust to New York and its demanding lifestyle.
I got a recommendation for a psychoanalyst on the Upper West Side and went to see her with family pictures in one hand and teenage poetry in the other. I went equipped with evidence that traveled in tightly packed suitcases from Lebanon to Africa, and from upstate to New York City. I was like those art experts who bring drawings to consult a colleague about their provenance and authenticity. I needed a second opinion, nothing more. I knew how and why I fit into the theory that the great master had developed. I just needed her to confirm a few things and recommend a treatment. I needed another set of eyes.
The more I reflect on that first encounter with my analyst in March 2001, the more I see myself as one of those asylum seekers who carry evidence of their abuse, desperate to convince a case worker of the legitimacy of their claim. Documents detailing torture needed to be seen to be believed. This refugee came to indict abusers from the past. He came to seek protection from the demons that were chasing him everywhere, at night. He came to make sure that their tentacles could never reach him in his newfound land. Except my documents were poems written in French about teenage angst, and family photos, mostly of my mom and a few of my dad. The pictures showed a happy family with a bit too much affection, perhaps. Two pictures stand out: one of me and my mom, like a prince and a queen, all in white. We are sitting on a beige silk couch with our arms stretched out, touching in the middle. Another picture is of the entire family on the terrace, with me lying on my dad’s lap like I would lie on that blue couch in my analyst’s office for the next eight years.
I brought these pictures to show her something about the poses and the proximity that my brother had warned about. She needed to see it so she could fix me, put me back together, and erect that boundary that should have been there from the beginning. I presented the evidence and explained to her that I, too, grew up in a traditional bourgeois household, with a nanny and a stay-at-home mom, much like Freud’s patients. I said:
“I come from the nineteenth century.”
She looked perplexed and immediately replied:
“I thought you were from Beirut. Don’t you want to talk about the war?”US

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